Heave, roll and pitch in NemaStudio 1.26

New version of NemaStudio includes Attitude instrument

Recently Sailsoft released version 1.26 of NemaStudio. Apart from a few relevant bug fixes and some minor improvements a new instrument is introduced, the Attitude instrument.

I have been very reluctant to implement this function since there is no NMEA 0183 standard for Attitude.

Heave, roll and pitch sensors have been produced by a limited number of manufacturers. Each of them using their own, proprietary sentence format not openly published.

Supported manufacturers

In the current version of the Attitude instrument I have implemented the formats of two manufacturers, Ashtech and Furuno, since some customers were so kind to inform me unofficially about the sentence formats of these manufacturers.

Attitude simulation mode

For each dimension (Roll, Pitch and Heave) an individual simulation option is available by checking the appropriate check box.

When not in simulation mode, each parameter (Roll, Pitch, Heave) can be set individually, also while running.

In simulation mode, the sample time for Roll, Pitch and Heave values is 1/100 second. The algorithm used to calculate the angle in degrees (resp. meters) is

((2 * MaxAngle)/Time)

With the high sensor update rate (0.01 sec) it is possible to achieve a fairly realistic output provided setting the Transmit Interval to a low value, e.g. 0.1 second or even less. Drawback is that you will need a fast serial port baud rate or use UDP ports to avoid buffer overruns.